Russian Expansion under Catherine the Great 31The patriarchate had been abolished by Peter the Great and replaced
be a secular directorate, the Holy Synod, which administered the
Church as a branch of state. In the first year of her reign, Catherine
confiscated the property of the Orthodox monasteries. If she could
strike with impunity directly at the power of the Church, she cer-
tainly did not have to answer to the Church about her attitude to-
ward Georgians and Armenians. Even when the Church had been
stronger, it traditionally emphasized the need to protect Russian
Orthodoxy from foreign contamination rather than advocating in-
creased contact of any sort with foreign Christendom. Among the
many causes of the seventeenth-century schism in Russian Ortho-
doxy was the hostility toward Patriarch Nikon's attempt to make
the Russian Church more like the Greek, which was judged heretical
by many Russians.
One interested group that had no influence on the formulation of
Russian policy toward Iran was the Russian middle class, specifically
the merchants. There was no powerful lobby of Russian merchants
involved in trade with Iran. That trade remained disappointingly small
throughout the eighteenth century. Most of the business was not in
the hands of Russians but of Armenians and to a lesser degree Iranians,
Indians, and others. Russian merchants who did business in the Cas-
pian region were more commonly involved in fishing and seal hunting
than in trade with Iran. During the eighteenth century, St. Petersburg
made repeated efforts to improve trade with Iran, but that did not
necessarily mean favoring Russian merchants. During the 1750s, Eliz-
abeth tried twice to set up chartered trading companies to deal with
Iran. Some Russian merchants favored this but others, including one
of those most active in the Caspian trade, were vehemently opposed.
Neither company did well, and Elizabeth authorized others to trade
with Iran in competition with the chartered companies. Among those
who were allowed to enter into this trade were people of noble rather
than merchant status like the courtier Lieutenant-General Roman
Vorontsov. When Catherine, a firm believer in the advantages of free
trade, came to the throne, she proclaimed that that principle should
apply in dealings with Iran, thereby abolishing the chartered compan-
ies. This was counter to the interests of one of the wealthiest mer-
chants in Moscow, a leading member of Elizabeth's Persian Trading
Company. Catherine subsequently reversed attempts by the governor
of Astrakhan to bar Armenians from building boats for the Caspian
trade. She also rejected the advice of a commission set up to study
trade with Iran that she establish a monopoly trading company. In